According to a research report by SmartAge.com and Millward Brown Intelliquest, those small businesses that have already surfed the Internet or intend to go online want to use Internet marketing as the main means to help them compete with large companies in the same industry.

According to the survey, the marketing means that small businesses are making use of or planning to use are: Email direct mail advertising, reciprocal links, member network community chat, electronic bulletin boards, free banner ads, charging banner ads and plug in advertisements.

The main findings of the survey are as follows:

80% of respondents expect online promotion to help them compete more effectively. No one thinks that online promotion will be of no use in the future.

45% of respondents believe that online promotion has played an effective role. Only 11% of respondents believe that online promotion can not play much role.

38% of respondents tried to use the Internet to promote users who influence the whole country, and 35% of respondents responded to the local market. 9% of respondents wanted to explore the international market.

47% of small businesses believe that online advertising is very important to companies. 14% think online advertising is not important to their company.

On average, more than half of companies spend less than $250 a month on online promotion. Of them, 24% of enterprises do not have any expenditure, and 32% of enterprises spend 1 to 249 dollars on online promotion.

Compared with offline promotion, more than 1/3 of enterprises spend less than $250 per month on online promotion. Of these, 10% of the company's promotion costs are 0, and 26% of the enterprises are online promotion costs between 1 and 249 dollars.